David L Wolper, who has died of heart disease aged 82, called his 2003 autobiography simply Producer. The modest, unadorned title gives no hint of the long and varied career it covers. According to Wolper: "A producer is a person who dreams. Good producers make dreams come true."

The word "producer" evokes thoughts of a crass, cigar-chomping entrepreneur, more interested in profit than art. Wolper both conformed to the stereotype and confounded it. His flamboyant showman side was on display with his staging of the spectacular Hollywood-style opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, which consisted of a four-hour musical extravaganza, with 84 pianists in white tuxedos who played George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on white grand pianos, surrounded by 300 dancers. In 1986, he produced a celebration of the 100th anniversary and restoration of the Statue of Liberty, which consisted of four days of fireworks, hundreds of tall ships in New York harbour and more than 20,000 performers.

On the other side was his perspicacity in buying the television rights of Roots, Alex Haley's 1976 book on the heritage of an African-American family through seven generations, even before it had been published. The 12-hour 1977 miniseries, on which Wolper was executive producer, won nine Emmy awards, and became a focus for discussions on race. One of the most watched programmes in the history of American television, it was, as Wolper remarked, "something of which we were extremely proud, in many ways, the ultimate docudrama; we had told an intelligent, educationally important story – and the nation had responded". It was broadcast in the UK by the BBC later that year, to large audiences and critical acclaim.

Born in New York City, Wolper was the only child of Irving and Anna Wolper; his father sold real estate. He studied film and journalism at the University of Southern California, where he helped put out a campus magazine, edited by the future humorist Art Buchwald. In 1949, with a schoolfriend, Jim Harris, Wolper had the foresight to set up a television distribution company, Flamingo Films, which sold films to the 50 TV stations on the air. The films were mainly old serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, B-movies and shorts. Two years later, in a $30m deal, Flamingo Films licensed the exclusive television rights to the 1948 Superman serial.

Now relatively well off, Wolper decided to become a producer, most- ly of television documentaries. His first venture was The Race for Space (1959), which he produced, directed and co-wrote. But when the three main television networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, refused to air it because it was made independently, outside their control, Wolper, using his renowned chutzpah, lined up 108 individual stations to show the film. The first documentary of the American-Soviet space race, using previously unseen government archive material, it was nominated for an Oscar.

David Wolper in 1987. Photograph: Mark Terrill/AP

The film's success helped him launch Wolper Productions, which focused on television documentaries and biographies, all of which were shown on the three major networks. After Roots, further triumphant mini-series included The Thorn Birds (1983), North and South (1985) and Love and War (1986). Wolper's penchant for fictionalising real lives, such as the series Lincoln (1974), brought rebukes from critics and historians. Wolper answered them by asking: "How else can we approach the past? Shall we leave it, defeated and ignorant, because we cannot fully reconstruct it any more than we can relive it?"

Credited as executive producer on most of his television projects, he inclined more to the executive than the producer, greenlighting the projects, and being in charge of the finances, leaving the creative side to others. He was rather more hands-on as producer of several features, notably two second world war films, The Devil's Brigade (1968) and The Bridge at Remagen (1969), as well as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Of the latter, Wolper said it was his only work specifically for children, though he "always hoped kids would learn from and enjoy my documentaries … Gene Wilder was perfect casting in the title role because he had a magical quality about him, the joy of a child in a man's body".

Wolper was also instrumental in convincing eight directors to make Visions of Eight, the official film of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Wolper's idea was that directors of different nationalities, working on one film, would symbolise the internationalism of the event. But it was another of his documentaries that gained the plaudits and won an Oscar – The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), which contained remarkable microphotography of insects.

Wolper was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in France, and received the Boy Scouts of America God and Country Exemplary award, the People for the American Way Spirit of Liberty award and, in 1984, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award Special Oscar. In 2002, most of the original cast of Roots returned for a documentary, Roots: Celebrating 25 Years, on which Wolper was again executive producer.

Wolper's three wives, Toni Carroll, Dawn Richard and Gloria Hill, were all actors. Gloria survives him, along with the three children of his second marriage.

• David Lloyd Wolper, film and television producer, born 11 January 1928; died 10 August 2010